The 100 Most Influential Contemporary Social Work Faculty as Assessed by the H-Index

Abstract

The names of faculty employed by the 76 member social work programs of the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education in Social Work were retrieved via a web-search. This resulted in a list of 2204 social work faculty. Their individual H-Indices were then obtained, using either the Publish or Perish software, or via manual calculations from Google Scholar. The top 100 most influential contemporary social work faculty were identified, resulting in a listing of individuals who have published relatively large numbers of scholarly works which themselves have been subsequently highly cited. Apart from recognizing these productive individuals, listing them and their home institutions will permit future researchers to examine the causes and correlates of high academic productivity.

Full text

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wssr20
Journal of Social Service Research
ISSN: 0148-8376 (Print) 1540-7314 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wssr20
The 100 Most Influential Contemporary Social
Work Faculty as Assessed by the H-Index
Bruce A. Thyer, Thomas E. Smith, Philip Osteen & Tyler Carter
To cite this article: Bruce A. Thyer, Thomas E. Smith, Philip Osteen & Tyler Carter (2019) The 100
Most Influential Contemporary Social Work Faculty as Assessed by the H-Index, Journal of Social
Service Research, 45:5, 696-700, DOI: 10.1080/01488376.2018.1501793
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01488376.2018.1501793
Published online: 18 Feb 2019.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 812
View Crossmark data

The 100 Most Influential Contemporary Social Work Faculty as Assessed by
the H-Index
Bruce A. Thyer
a
, Thomas E. Smith
a
, Philip Osteen
b
, and Tyler Carter
a
a
Florida State University, College of Social Work, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA;
b
University of Utah, College of
Social Work, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
ABSTRACT
The names of faculty employed by the 76 member social work programs of the Group for
the Advancement of Doctoral Education in Social Work were retrieved via a web-search. This
resulted in a list of 2204 social work faculty. Their individual H-Indices were then obtained,
using either the Publish or Perish software, or via manual calculations from Google Scholar.
The top 100 most influential contemporary social work faculty were identified, resulting in a
listing of individuals who have published relatively large numbers of scholarly works which
themselves have been subsequently highly cited. Apart from recognizing these productive
individuals, listing them and their home institutions will permit future researchers to exam-
ine the causes and correlates of high academic productivity.
KEYWORDS
H-Index; impact factor;
social work faculty;
scholarly influence; citations
The evaluation of social work faculty is an
inexact science and may involve separate meth-
ods to appraise teaching effectiveness, contribu-
tions to professional service, and scholarly
impact. Long-standing measures of scholarship
have included tabulating the numbers of publica-
tions authored by the faculty member in the
form of articles in professional journals, chapters
and books. A more recent metric involves count-
ing the citations to a faculty member’s publica-
tions, with the inference made that scholarly
works that are little cited make less of a scholarly
contribution to disciplinary intellectual discourse
than works that are cited a great deal
(Westbrook, 1960). Scholarly databases such as
the Web of Science and Google Scholar make it
possible to see how often a given publication has
been cited, and the total number of citations
accumulated by a given author for all of their
oeuvre. Although an admittedly limited way to
assess influence, citation counts have emerged as
a broadly accepted indicator of scholarly influ-
ence and are now widely included in making pro-
motion and tenure decisions, and as one criteria
used to allocate academic awards. Citations to
one’s work also have a financial impact in terms
of academic raises and merit bonuses (Balaban,
1996; Diamond, 1986).
A more sophisticated way to tabulate one’s cit-
ation impact is called the H-Index, created by
Hirsch (2005) and is defined as “A scientist has
index hif hof his/her N
p
papers have at least h
citations each, and the other (N
p
h) papers have
no more than hcitations each”(p. 16569). For
example, an author who has 10 publications
which have been cited at least 10 times will have
an h-index of 10. An author that has five cita-
tions which have been cited at least five times
each would have an H-Index of five. An author
of 10 publications, but only five of which have
been cited at least five times would have an H-
Index of five. Thus, simply authoring many pub-
lications will not increase one’s H-Index unless
these works are cited. Higher H-Indices are expo-
nentially more difficult to achieve. Moving from
an H-Index of 5–10 is much easier than moving
from 30 to 35, for example, being dependent not
only on the raw numbers of publications but also
CONTACT Bruce A. Thyer Bthyer@fsu.edu Florida State University, College of Social Work, Florida State University, 296 Champions Way,
Tallahassee, FL 32306.
ß2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SERVICE RESEARCH
2019, VOL. 45, NO. 5, 696–700
https://doi.org/10.1080/01488376.2018.1501793

upon the subsequent citations to one’s works.
The use of the H-Index has been widely adopted
by many academic disciplines and professions,
including social work. Popularity aside, H-Index
scores have been identified to be highly corre-
lated with other bibliometric ratings of impact
and subjective perceptions of scholarly impact
(Hodge & Lacasse, 2011a). The H-index has been
used to evaluate individual social work faculty
(Hodge, Kremer, & Vaughn, 2016; Marshall
et al., 2016), social work programs (by combining
the H-Indices of a program’s faculty to arrive at
an program’s overall H-Index) (Barner, Holosko,
Thyer, & King, 2015), highly cited social work
articles (e.g., Martinez, Herrera, Contreras, Ruiz,
& Herrera-Viedma, 2015), and social work jour-
nals (Hodge & Lacasse, 2011a, 2011b; Lacasse,
Hodge, & Bean, 2011). These efforts within social
work parallel those undertaken in other fields
such as psychology (Diener, Oishi, & Park, 2014;
Farrell et al., 2016; Haslam, Stratemeyer, &
Vargas-Saenz, 2016; Nosek et al., 2010) and soci-
ology (Jacobs, 2016).
We extended these prior forms of bibliometric
analyses to calculate the 100 most influential
contemporary social work faculty as assessed by
the H-Index. There are several reasons for doing
this. One is to establish descriptively a tabulation
of current social work faculty whose scholarship
is having the greatest impact (in terms of being
highly cited). It is appropriate to publicly recog-
nize these individuals for their immense contri-
butions to academic discourse and to the
intellectual life of the profession. Another reason
for identifying these individuals is that future
researchers can undertake analyses to ascertain
factors correlated with high levels of productivity
(e.g., Are certain doctoral-granting institutions
disproportionately presented among the back-
grounds of these authors? Do the home institu-
tions of these social work faculty share certain
characteristics? What may be the roles of
selected demographic variables in promoting
high-impact scholarship?). By preparing such a
descriptive list now, scholars will be able to
update these tabulations to see how the list has
changed over time (e.g., Are women scholars
more represented?)
Method
Sample of Faculty
The faculty listings for each of the 76 social work
programs listed on the website of the Group for the
Advancement of Doctoral Education in Social Work
were reviewed (http://www.gadephd.org/member-
ship) and we developed a list of 2204 social work
faculty employed by programs offering a doctoral
degree in social work. Only individuals holding a
doctoral degree in their respective field (PhD, DSW,
EdD, MD, JD) were included for data collection.
Data Collection
The number of citations for each listed faculty
member was determined using the H-Index as cal-
culated by the Publish or Perish (PoP) software
program (Harzing, 2007). PoP draws on the
Google Scholar database and systematically produ-
ces an H-Index for that individual faculty member.
For faculty who had a Google Scholar profile, the
listed h-index score on their profile was recorded.
For those without a profile, a manual count was
conducted. To assess the reliability of manual
counts, PoP H-Index scores were collected for the
125 cases with the largest listed H-Indices. The
PoP-derived H-Index matched the Google Scholar-
based manual count with a Cronbach’s alpha score
of 0.995, suggesting the essential equivalence
between the PoP and manually-derived H-indices
When there were discrepancies, the actual publica-
tion was retrieved to ensure which count was cor-
rect. The collection window for manual H-Index
scoring was from September 7, 2015 to January 31,
2016 (N¼2204). The collection time frame for
PoP-derived H-Index scores occurred from
February 11, 2016 to February 21, 2016.
Results
Table 1 lists the top 100 most influential contem-
porary social work faculty, as assessed by the
H-Index.
Discussion
The individuals appearing in Table 1 deserve to
be recognized for their significant contributions
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SERVICE RESEARCH 697

to the profession’s intellectual life. Their works
are substantive both in terms of quantity, the
sheer numbers of published works, but also in
terms of their quality, or utility, being used by
others. A substantial proportion of scholarly
articles are never cited (Hamilton, 1990), further
highlighting the significant impact the authors of
very highly cited papers exert on the field.
One aspect of the results that is rather striking
is that among the 10 most influential social work
faculty, 8 individuals are found who are not
themselves social workers. Only Steketee (#8) and
Barth (#9) have social work degrees. The other
eight hold doctorates in fields such as sociology
(Hawkins, Catalano, Mechanic, Vega), epidemi-
ology (Brownson), psychology (Bengston,
Jaccard) and medicine (Shear). These are persons
housed in a social work program and undoubt-
edly conduct much high-quality work in the field
of social services. Additional nonsocial workers
appear throughout our list (e.g., Charles Figley),
and our field is most fortunate that these persons
have chosen to pursue careers within our aca-
demic programs. But does it say something about
the quality of the research training obtained via
Table 1. 125 social work faculty ranked by PoP H-Index.
Faculty name School H-Index
1 J David Hawkins University of Washington 91
2 Richard F Catalano Jr University of Washington 88
3 David Mechanic Rutgers 87
4 Ross C Brownson Washington University 84
5 Vern Bengtson University of Southern California 76
6 James Jaccard NYU 73
7 Katherine Shear Columbia University 72
8 Gail Steketee Boston University 72
9 Richard P Barth University Maryland- Baltimore 63
10 William Vega University of Southern California 63
11 Richard (James) Gelles University of Pennsylvania 62
12 Jane Waldfogel Columbia University 60
13 Sheryl I Zimmerman UNC Chapel Hill 58
14 Marsha Mailick University of Wisconsin-Madison 58
15 Robert Joseph Taylor University of Michigan 57
16 Lawrence Palinkas University of Southern California 55
17 Jens Ludwig University of Chicago 53
18 David Takeuchi Boston College 52
19 Linda M Chatters University of Michigan 52
20 Peter Conrad Brandeis University 50
21 Matthew W Kreuter Washington University 50
22 Steven C Marcus University of Pennsylvania 48
23 Irwin Garfinkel Columbia University 47
24 Stephen Crystal Rutgers 47
25 Hortensia Amaro University of Southern California 47
26 Penelope Trickett University of Southern California 47
27 Nabila El-Bassel Columbia University 46
28 Edward C Chang University of Michigan 46
29 Charles R Figley Tulane 45
30 Sue Levkoff University of South Carolina 44
31 Jeffrey L Edleson UC Berkley 43
32 Jennifer L Skeem UC Berkley 43
33 Mark Umbreit University of Minnesota 43
34 Jan Steven Greenberg University of Wisconsin-Madison 43
35 Bruce Thyer Florida State 42
36 Jerome C Wakefield NYU 42
37 Elizabeth Wells University of Washington 41
38 Mark W Fraser UNC Chapel Hill 40
39 Claudia J Coulton Case Western 39
40 Michael G Vaughn Saint Louis University 39
41 Phyllis Solomon University of Pennsylvania 39
42 Iris Chi University of Southern California 39
43 Steven P Schinke Columbia University 38
44 David K Cohen UC Los Angeles 38
45 Robert F Schilling UC Los Angeles 38
46 Gary L Bowen UNC Chapel Hill 38
47 Ram Cnaan University of Pennsylvania 38
48 Todd Herrenkohl University of Washington 38
49 Diane M Morrison University of Washington 38
50 Michael Sherraden Washington University 38
51 Louisa Gilbert Columbia University 37
52 Mark E Courtney University of Chicago 37
53 Daniel G Saunders University of Michigan 37
54 Daniel Flannery Case Western 36
55 Deborah K Padgett NYU 36
56 Ronald William Toseland University at Albany (SUNY) 36
57 Michael Fendrich University of Connecticut 36
58 Matthew O Howard UNC Chapel Hill 36
59 Susan B Sorenson University of Pennsylvania 36
60 Charles Glisson University of Tennessee 36
61 Luis H Zayas UT Austin 36
62 Karl G Hill University of Washington 36
63 Katherine Magnuson University of Wisconsin-Madison 36
64 Debra Haire-Joshu Washington University 36
65 Nancy Morrow-Howell Washington University 36
66 Dennis P Culhane University of Pennsylvania 35
67 Kevin Haggerty University of Washington 35
68 Douglas A Luke Washington University 35
69 Ruth G McRoy Boston College 34
70 Deborah L Tolman Hunter College (CUNY) 34
71 Richard M Tolman University of Michigan 34
(Continued)
Table 1. Continued.
Faculty name School H-Index
72 Ron Avi Astor University of Southern California 34
73 Craig Nagoshi UT Arlington 34
74 Melissa Jonson-Reid Washington University 34
75 Gerald J Mahoney Case Western 34
76 David R Hodge Arizona State 33
77 James Midgley UC Berkley 33
78 Yeheskel (Zeke) Hasenfeld UC Los Angeles 33
79 Deborah Gorman-Smith University of Chicago 33
80 Lisa Berlin University Maryland- Baltimore 33
81 Joseph A Himle University of Michigan 33
82 John Brekke University of Southern California 33
83 Michael W Arthur University of Washington 33
84 Andres Gil Florida International 32
85 James Lubben Boston College 32
86 Neil Gilbert UC Berkley 32
87 Harold Pollack University of Chicago 32
88 Kathleen Ell University of Southern California 32
89 John S Wodarski University of Tennessee 32
90 Cynthia GS Franklin UT Austin 32
91 Paula Nurius University of Washington 32
92 Amy Horowitz Fordham University 31
93 Flavio Marsiglia Arizona State 31
94 Jill Levenson Barry 31
95 Aloen L Townsend Case Western 31
96 Eileen Gambrill UC Berkley 31
97 Steven P Segal UC Berkley 31
98 Sydney Hans University of Chicago 31
99 Allen Rubin University of Houston 31
100 Catherine Cubbin UT Austin 31
101 Peter J Pecora University of Washington 31
102 Enola K Proctor Washington University 31
103 Laurie E Powers Portland State 31
698 T. E. SMITH ET AL.

social work doctorates that many of the very
most productive faculty in our field were trained
through other disciplinary traditions and lack a
social work educational background?
Although it is important to identify our field’s
most influential contemporary social work faculty,
there are some limitations to this approach. The
H-Index is subject to artificial inflation when
authors inappropriately and frequently cite their
past publications in contemporary writing, thus
rendering this metric a potentially inaccurate
measure of true value as determined via legitimate
citations from other independent scholars. The H-
Index may favor male authors (Geraci, Balsis, &
Busch, 2015) as men seem to engage in self-cit-
ation (which artificially inflates one’s H-Index)
more often than do women (King, Bergstrom,
Correll, Jacquet, & West, 2017). Senior faculty,
administrators, and journal editors may coerce
authorships and citations from junior researchers
that can also have the effect of elevating the senior
faculty’s H-Index above its legitimate value (Kwok,
2008). It is also recognized that not all citations to
an author’s work are laudatory. Someone who
writes a number of inflammatory papers or ones
that contain egregious errors may well have his or
her work extensively cited by others, but this does
not equate to making a positive contribution to
knowledge. However, such potential contaminants
to the purity of the H-Index would seem to exert
their malignant effect across the board, so to
speak, and not greatly influence the relative rank-
ings which are presented in Table 1, or signifi-
cantly impact our listing of the 100 most
influential contemporary social work faculty.
Lack of resources precluded the tabulation of
the several thousand faculty employed in BSW
and MSW programs that do not offer the doc-
toral degree, and to calculate their corresponding
H-Indices. It is possible that some faculty among
these nondoctoral-granting programs would have
appeared in our list of most influential scholars if
their citations had been similarly calculated.
Although this is unlikely to be the case, other
scholars may wish to undertake this type of more
in-depth analysis.
The conventional H-Index tends to favor older,
more established scholars who have been publish-
ing over a longer time frame, with this longevity
making possible a higher H-Index. One must have
high number of publications to have a high H-
Index, although quantity of papers does not ensure
the subsequent citations needed to develop a high
H-Index. A variant of the H-Index, the i10-index,
takes into account only papers that have received
10 new citations during the past 5 years. This
attenuates to some extent the role of longevity in
promoting a high H-Index. This analysis only
examined the H-Indices of faculty currently
employed within social work programs. This is
another limitation. No doubt many long (and
recently) deceased, retired, or emeritus social
workers would have appeared on our list had we
had the resources available to conduct such a com-
plicated retrieval process. Social work faculty
whose works appear in nonEnglish language jour-
nals will not have these articles retrieved by
Google Scholar, which is another limitation.
In his original paper outlining the H-Index,
Hirsch sounded a proper warning: “Obviously a
single number can never give more than a rough
approximation of an individual’s multifaceted
profile, and many other factors should be consid-
ered in combination in evaluating an individual
(2005, p. 16571). This caution is warranted. For
example, one may exert considerable positive dis-
ciplinary influence through nonresearch-related
activities. The legislative career of former U.S.
Senator Barbara Mikulski, the financial counsel-
ing empire of Suzie Orman, and the inspirational
talks and books of Bene Brown, social workers
all, come to mind in this regard and they deserve
honor for the roles they have played. However,
for social workers that have chosen an academic
career at a university that emphasizes research
and publications, the role of citation metrics such
as the H-Index is a useful tool to gauge one’s
scholarly influence. This listing of the 100 most
influential contemporary social work faculty may
serve as a stimulus for future research into the
causes and correlates of such high achievement
(see Corcoran, Robbins, Hepler, & Magner, 1987)
References
Balaban, A. T. (1996). How should citations to articles in
high- and low-impact journals be valuated, or what is a
citation worth? Scientometrics,37, 495–498.
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SERVICE RESEARCH 699

Barner, J. R., Holosko, M. J., Thyer, B. A., & King, S.
(2015). Research productivity in top- ranked schools in
psychology and social work: Does having a research cul-
ture matter? Journal of Social Work Education,51(1),
5–18. http://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2015.977123
Corcoran, K. J., Robbins, S. P., Hepler, S. E., & Magner,
G. W. (1987). Support systems and scholarly activity.
Journal of Applied Social Sciences,11, 230–242.
Diamond, A. M. (1986). What is a citation worth? Journal
of Human Resources,21(2), 200–215.
Diener, E., Oishi, S., & Park, J. Y. (2014). An incomplete
list of eminent psychologists of the modern era. Archives
of Scientific Psychology,2(1), 20–32.
Farrell, A. H., Semplonius, T., Shapira, M., Zhou, X.,
Laurence, S., Willoughby, T., …Evans, A. D. (2016).
Research activity in Canadian developmental sychology
programs. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne,
57(2), 76–82.
Geraci, L., Balsis, S., & Busch, A. J. B. (2015). Gender and
the H-Index in psychology. Scientometrics,105,
2023–2034. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1757-5
Hamilton, D. P. (1990). Publishing by-and for?-the num-
bers. Science,250(4986), 1331–1332.
Harzing, A. W. (2007). Publish or perish. Retrieved from
http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm
Haslam, N., Stratemeyer, M., & Vargas-Saenz, A. (2016).
Scholarly productivity and citation impact of academic
psychologists in a group of eight countries. Australian
Journal of Psychology,69(3), 162–166.
Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual’s
scientific research output. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,
102(46), 16569–16572. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.
0507655102
Hodge, D. R., Kremer, K. P., & Vaughn, M. G. (2016).
High-impact social work scholars: A bibliographic exam-
ination of SSWR and AASWSW Fellows. Research on
Social Work Ractice,26(7), 751–761.
Hodge, D. R., & Lacasse, J. R. (2011). Evaluating journal
quality: Is the H-Index a better measure than impact
factors? Research on Social Work Practice,21(2), 222–230.
http://doi.org/10.1177/1049731510369141
Hodge, D. R., & Lacasse, J. R. (2011). Ranking disciplinary
journals with the Google Scholar H-Index: A new tool
for constructing cases for tenure, promotion, and other
professional decisions. Journal of Social Work Education,
47(3), 579–596.
Jacobs, J. A. (2016). Journal rankings in sociology: Using
the H Index with Google Scholar. The American
Sociologist,47(2-3), 192–224.
King, M. M., Bergstrom, C. T., Correll, S. J., Jacquet, J., &
West, J. D. (2017). Men set their own cites high: Gender
and self-citation across fields and over time. Socius,3,
1–22.
Kwok, L. S. (2008). The white bull effect: Abusive coauthor-
ship and publication parasitism. Journal of Medical
Ethics,31(9), 554–556.
Lacasse, J. R., Hodge, D. R., & Bean, K. F. (2011).
Evaluating the productivity of social work scholars using
the H-Index. Research on Social Work Practice,21(5),
599–607. http://doi.org/10.1177/1049731511405069
Marshall, I., Smith, B. D., Green, M. T., Anderson, B.,
Harry, S. V., Byrd, Y. M., …Hill, S. (2016). Scholarly
productivity of social work faculty at historically Black
colleges and universities: Are H-Index scores a suitable
measure? Journal of Social Work Education,52(1),
95–107. http://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2016.1112645
Martinez, M. A., Herrera, M., Contreras, E., Ruiz, A., &
Herrera-Viedma, E. (2015). Characterizing highly cited
papers in social work through H-classics. Scientometrics,
102(2), 1713–1729.
Nosek, B. A., Graham, J., Lindner, N. M., Kesebir, S.,
Hawkins, C. B., Hahn, C., …Tenney, E. R. (2010).
Cumulative and career-stage citation impact of social-per-
sonality psychology programs and their members.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,36(10),
1283–1300.
Westbrook, J. H. (1960). Identifying significant research.
Science,132(3435), 1229–1234.
700 T. E. SMITH ET AL.